Keir Hardie

Keir Hardie (15 August 1856-26 September 1915) was the leader of the UK Labor Party from 17 January 1906 to 22 January 1908, preceding Arthur Henderson. Hardie, a Scottish socialist activist and lay priest, was the first leader of the Labor Party, as well as its first member of parliament. Hardie was known for his campaigning for universal suffrage, temperance, self-rule for India, home-rule for Scotland, and desegregation in South Africa.

Biography
James Keir Hardie was born in Newhouse, Lanarkshire, Scotland on 15 August 1856, the son of a carpenter and a domestic servant. He became a messenger boy for a steamship company at the age of seven, and he lived a life of poverty as a child worker. However, he received a rigorous education from his parents at home, and he attended night school while working at the mines. Hardie became a full-time trade union organizer at the mines, and he led the Ayrshire miners' strike of 1881, forcing the mine-owners to grant concessions to the mine workers for fear of future industrial action. Hardie later became a convinced socialist, advocating gradual reform in the place of violent revolution. In 1892, he was elected as a Member of Parliament for West Ham South as an independent, and he founded the Independent Labor Party the next year. In 1906, Hardie founded the UK Labor Party, and he became its first member of parliament. Hardie campaigned for universal suffrage, temperance, self-rule for the British Raj in India, home-rule for Scotland, and an end to segregation in South Africa, and he attempted to organize a pacifist general strike shortly after the start of World War I. However, he died in a hospital in Glasgow on 26 September 1915 at the age of 59 after a series of strokes.